A lot of people say a lot of smart stuff about service-oriented architecture every week. It's amazing how much sober advice there is out there. This week I thought I'd pool together some of the wiser things I've read of late.
According to a recent column by analyst Judith Hurwitz: "While there may be components that are different and innovative – most services are common across business units. Unique implementations of the same services are simply that – repetition based on aging business models that simply have outlasted their usefulness."
In speaking about best practices for building an SOA business case, Brad Shimmin of Current Analysis LLC said: "I would never even mention SOA. I would build my business case without SOA. I'd build it simply as a business case for the IT infrastructure that will either make us money or save us money."
British Telecom chief architect George Glass offered up this comforting bit of advice in a recent interview: "You can predict what the level of performance will be. You can design the service with that in mind."
In talking about SOA without Web services, Progress Software Corp. CTO Hub Vandervoort said: "With most financial services firms, especially in the front office trading environment and especially as it relates to exchanges, you simply can't meet their performance objectives with the WS-standards today. HTTP SOAP just isn't reliable enough nor does it have the performance for the kind of traffic we're talking about here."
Blogger and enterprise architect Mike Kavis laid how he sold his employers on SOA, writing: "Once the business knew that SOA was the enabler for their BPM initiative, which happened to have an eight figure ROI over five years, they didn't need to hear anymore. They only wanted to know how much!"
During a Q&A, Sandy Carter, vice president for SOA and WebSphere strategy at IBM, offered up this little bit of practical advice: "My father always told me: 'Learn from someone else's mistakes, so you don't have to go through those mistakes. It will make your life much easier.'"
In a discussion with Dana Gardner about SOA management, ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg said: "As management technology improves, it is less and less about just monitoring stuff, and more and more about being able to deal with issues as a matter of policy, where your policy is in place for dealing with problems that you can't predict — and those are the most challenging ones.
